Specific Recommendations

• In the near future, UMBC should develop a plan for upgrading and updating the SGI Challenge computer. It is certain that the demand from the faculty for this computer will grow in the next a few years. UMBC should take a pro-active approach to keep the Challenge's processing power, memory and disk capacities up to the demand. It would be very counter productive if heavily used, shared research tools such as the Challenge XL play an important role in faculty research for just a short period of time. If the Challenge is slowly allowed to slip below state-of-the-art we will waste time-consuming faculty efforts that went into effectively utilizing the Challenge's capabilities.

• ACS should continue to support faculty UNIX workstations. We should also continue with the ACS policy to only support workstations manufactured by Sun and SGI, although this policy should be reviewed every year to two.

• A high speed internal network should be phased in during the next several years that will allow researchers to utilize efficient, cheap mass storage on central servers.

• The advisability of a common UMBC mass storage facility should be considered in concert with all ITT users/providers on campus.

• Our external network connection speeds to the Internet should be increased occasionally to match the effective available speeds of external information suppliers.

• Faculty need increased access to the UMBC network from home, both in terms of additional modems (or eventually ISDN connections) and higher connect speeds. The lack of modem connections hampers researchers ability to work at home at night and on weekends. (This recommendation mirrors an earlier one under Networking Infrastructure.)